I am generating very large hex grids (up to 120k total hexes at 32px wide hexes results in over 12k wide images) and I'm trying to find an efficient way to bind these to OpenGL textures in libgdx. I was thinking of using multiple FBOs and breaking the grid up as necessary into tiles, but I'm not sure how to ensure continuity between the FBOs. I can't start with one massive FBO, because that is backed up by a texture so it would fail from trying to load it to video memory. I can't use a standard bitmap on the heap because I need the drawing functionality of an OpenGL surface.
So what I was thinking was I would need to overdraw on the FBOs and somehow pick up on the next FBO exactly where the previous left off. However I'm not sure how to go about this. I'm drawing the hex grid with a series of hexagonal meshes, FYI.
Of course, there's probably some other much simpler and more efficient way to do this that I'm not even thinking of, which is why I pose this question to you fine people!
You have to draw it in pieces. You need to be able to draw your hex grid from an arbitrary position. This means being able to compute which hexes to draw based on a rectangle overlaid over the map. This isn't a hard problem, and I wouldn't worry too much about drawing extra stuff off-screen. You should master this ability to view the hexmap from any position before moving on.
Once you've mastered that, it's really simple.
Draw the top-left corner and store the pixel data. Then move the area you're drawing over exactly one image width. Draw and store that. Move the area over one image width. Draw and store it. Keep doing that until you've covered the entire width.
Move down one image height and repeat the process. Once you've run out of width and height, you're done. Save your mega-huge image.
You don't need FBOs for this. You could draw it to the screen if you wanted. Though if you want maximum performance, I would suggest using FBOs, double buffering them, and using glReadPixels though a pixel buffer object. That should cut down a lot on latency.
Related
I am using libGDX to make a small game, I made a little sprite (32x32) that is shown in the center of the screen. For some reason when I render the texture to the screen it loses its quality. Since the textures are so small I made the screen width and height 200 and 100 respectively. Any tips or answers would be much appreciated.
Your sprite (32x32) needs to be displayed on an area which is larger than 32x32, meaning that the image needs to be upscaled and interpolated (i.e. pixels between the 32 known ones need to be calculated). A common approach is smooth (often times linear) interpolation to fill in the additional pixels, which works well for photorealistic textures; it appears to have occurred here.
For pixel-art, you likely want "nearest-neighbor" interpolation instead. While the exact way to set it depends on the structure of your code, you may be able to do something like:
textureObject.setFilter(TextureFilter.Nearest, TextureFilter.Nearest);
I want to reduce draw calls on my isometric map implementation so I thought about combining multiple meshes and draw them in one go. I am currently creating a mesh from all tiles in a 8x8 "chunk". This means a mesh containing floors, walls and objects. These floors, walls and objects are just quads placed along the regular axis where Y is up. A rotated orthographic camera provides the isometric projection matrix. Most floors and walls fill up the full quad with an opaque texture but some, and most objects have alpha transparency like a window, broken floor or a chair object. I am building the "chunk" mesh by adding individual meshes to it, I do this in order of drawing back to front and bottom to top otherwise the combined chunk mesh is not properly rendered at all. I render all of the needed chunks also in the same order and this works great.
However the drawing problems start when I need to add additional objects "inside" these mesh chunks. For example a moving player which is also just a quad with a transparent texture. I need to be able to put him inside that chunk mesh, perhaps on a tile where he is in front of a wall and behind a window. If I would render the player prior to the chunk, it's transparent pixels would not show the chunk mesh. If I would render the player after the chunk the player would not be visible trough a transparent quad in the chunk. If this could be solved easily and not to expensive on the CPU/GPU that would be the solution to my question. However I am considering myself new to OpenGL so I do not know it's magic very well.
I can think of a view solutions to tackle this problem that do not involve OpenGL:
Dump the chunk mesh method and just draw back to front. I either need a more efficient way of drawing or don't allow to zoom out as much to reduce draw calls since this is a bottleneck.
Get rid of the quads with transparency and make them full 3D. I feel this should be a design choice and not a mandatory thing, besides that it would add a lot of additional work to creating all these assets. Now I just have a textures projected on a quad instead of fully UV'd models with individual textures.
Draw all transparent objects after the chunks in proper order. This feels kinda hacky and error prone since some objects need to go into that chunk mesh and some don't.
Only combine floors in a batch mesh. The floors are the biggest bottleneck, the bottom of the map has all floor tiles filled which are about 4000 draw calls when drawn individually, a big building uses a lot of floors too for each Z level. Walls and objects are drawn significantly less, probably just a couple hundred maximum all the way zoomed out. SO for each chunk draw all floors in one call and then each individual object, I'd reduce draw calls a lot by just combining the floors. When drawing walls and objects I have to check if there is a potential dynamic object to be rendered or just check if there are dynamic objects within the chunk and sort them with all the walls and objects before drawing them.
This is how I currently render.
Gdx.gl.glEnable(GL20.GL_DEPTH_TEST);
Gdx.gl.glEnable(GL20.GL_BLEND);
Gdx.gl.glBlendFunc(GL20.GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL20.GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA);
shader.begin();
shader.setUniformMatrix("u_worldView", cam.combined);
// If I draw the player before the chunk the transparency of the player would not render the chunk.
player.getMesh().render(shader, GL20.GL_TRIANGLES);
// Drawing the mesh chunk combines of floors, walls and objects of each tile within the chunk.
chunk.getCombinedMesh().render(shader, GL20.GL_TRIANGLES);
// If I draw the player after the chunk the player would not be drawn if it is behind a transparent mesh like a window or a tree.
player.getMesh().render(shader, GL20.GL_TRIANGLES);
shader.end();
So what are my options here? Can I fix this by using some magic tricks out of the OpenGL hat? Or do you have another suggestion to put on the list above? I am using LibGDX for my project.
I want to create an illusion of a moving road or path.
For fun, I was thinking about how this could be done:
draw the whole path out in an image and simply have the image scroll across the screen - this would be annoying to manually draw and eliminates the ability to have a random path.
generate a pixel thin line equal the to width of the path at the top of the screen and simply move the line down the screen to have it scroll. And constantly generate new lines at the top in a slightly different location.
This is all I could come up with, I'm sure there are much better ways. How would y'all do it?
What about making a queue which stores the path with a maximum size. And then you just redraw it when it gets updated.
I think drawing the line again is comparable to drawing a full screen image in performance concerns. Furthermore it will take less memory.
I have some very small images (20 by 20 pixels) which I am drawing using matrices onto a canvas using Canvas.drawBitmap(Bitmap, Matrix, Paint). The problem is that I am scaling these up about 5-10 times larger when I am drawing them and it is automatically re-sampling these images with smoothness. What I want is nearest-neighbour style re-sampling (so it will look pixelated) not the smoothness. I cannot find a way to change this. Also creating another whole image that is larger to store a properly re-sampled picture is not an option since I am under memory constraints. Thanks for any help!
You need to set up the paint you pass to drawBitmap, like so:
paint.setFilterBitmap(false);
I'm trying to draw a 2D contour plot of some data on Android and I'm wondering what the best approach would be to draw those. The whole datasets can be relatively large (2k * 2k points) and zooming and moving inside the plot should be very fast. Most of the time only a small part of the data will be drawn as the user has zoomed in on the data.
My idea now would be to draw the whole plot onto a large canvas, but clip it to the portion visible on the screen, so that only that part would be really drawn in the end. I find the 2D drawing API of Android somewhat confusing and I'm not sure if this is really a feasible approach and how I would then go about executing it.
So my questions are:
Is it a good idea to draw onto a canvas much larger than the screen and use clipping to display only the relevant part?
How would I create a larger canvas and how would I select which parts should be drawn?
You should start the other way around. Instead of creating a huge canvas you should detect what part of your plot you need to draw and draw only that.
So basically you need some navigation/scrolling and you need to keep the offset from the starting point in memory to calculate where you are. Using the offset you can easily zoom in and out because you just need to scale the plot to the screen.
Is it a good idea to draw onto a
canvas much larger than the screen and
use clipping to display only the
relevant part?
A better question might be, do you have any other options. Some might argue that this is a bad idea since your going to keep memory in use when it isn't relevant to whats happening on the UI. However, from my experiences with the Canvas, I think you'll find this should work out just fine. Now, if you are trying to keep "5 square miles" of canvas in memory your definitely going to have to find a better way to manage it.
How would I create a larger canvas and
how would I select which parts should
be drawn?
I would expect that you will be creating your own "scrolling" method when the user touches the screen via overriding the onTouchEvent method. Basically your going to need to keep track of a starting point X and Y and just track that value as you move the Canvas on screen. In order to move the Canvas there are a number of built in's like translate and scale that you can use to both move the Canvas in X and Y as well as scale it when the user zooms in or out.
I don't think that is a good idea to draw your 2D contour plot on a big bitmap because you need a vector type graphics to zoom in and out in order to keep it sharp. Only pictures are good to scale down but graphs will lose thin lines or come out deformed when scaled down in bitmaps.
The proper way is to do it all mathematically and to calculate which part of the graph should be drawn for required position and zoom. Using anti_alias paint for lines and text, the graph would always come out sharp and good...
When the user zooms out, some items should not be drawn as they could not fit into the screen or would clutter it. So the graph would be always optimised for the zoom level...